The infographic presents finding on the categories and aspects of categories that present barriers including:

Working Knowledge

Category Suitability

Software

Internal Resources

Supplier Market

Perception

To download the full infographic of Barriers to Adopting Reverse Auctions, visit here.

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!

Friday, 23 June 2017

Firstly, I had no idea about the company apart from my own research. In my research, I kept on seeing words which were unfamiliar with myself. Procurement, eAuctions and eSourcing. This all sounded very confusing at first, but I was confident that I’d be learning about it all soon enough.

A day in the Office.

The office was not what I was expecting. Its location was surrounded by fields. Lots of friendly people working hard (or at least most of the time). It was a fun looking place, dealing with high-level procurement organisations. I soon learnt more about my unfamiliar words, and by the end of the first day I felt like I had been learning a whole different language (SaaS, RFx, MLIBS and MOFA).

Myself and Harry

Myself and Harry joined the internship to get some work experience in a business and to create a film. A film which would explore the benefits of Market Dojo. Hopefully, with the learning from our University course and the brain power from the two of us (Majority mine), we would create an engaging piece of material.

Pitching the Film ideas was a fun experience. Before the pitch, we got a few test questions to ease us in pitching and breaking the ice. Let's just say that the University didn't prepare me for these types of questions, but I’ll get back to this later. Before the pitches, myself and Harry had come up with 12 quick but well thought out ideas which then the crew at Market Dojo had to sit through.

Myself congratulating our actor

Afterwards, we planned to create two types of films. One a promo/advert style video and the other a simple getting the co-founders to explain to the camera/audience about Market Dojo and eSourcing. This was what was decided by ourselves and the Market Dojo crew.

We spent time learning about running the social media side and website design marketing. As well as learning that we would be adding our own blog up on their blogger page. Hoping so far so good.

On Tuesday we did our first bit of filming. We had previously been in contact with the Cheltenham Museum to collect some artefacts as props for the film and the Monday we picked up the filming kit. The film promo idea was to tell a quick story through time with eSourcing.

Improvised desk

Harry having a quick drink before filming

On Thursday we were back at Market Dojo to do some more filming, shooting the interview/explaining styled film and the office scenes for the promo film. We found a lovely spot to film the founders of the company using a field for the background to represent their free spirits.

The next week was spent editing the films. Myself and Harry edited the films back in Cheltenham ready to show Market Dojo on Friday.

I had a great time at Market Dojo; learning the trade, creating some films and meeting some genuinely really nice people. I’ll leave Market Dojo asking myself one question. Why did I choose the armpit dispenser over the ham hand?

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!

Hi, I'm Harry. I've just wrapped up my second year of study at the University of Gloucestershire and have been in search of bright new opportunities in the film industry. This is my experience as a Market Dojo Intern.

Me (Left), Ed (Right)

Market Dojo wasn’t a place that I thought I’d be when finishing my second year of university on a film production course, but here I am, busy working in an office from nine to five and being taught all sorts of wonderful things about procurement and social media management.

When you picture working in an office you usually imagine being surrounded by a life draining amount of grey concrete and stuffy old men in suits. But to my surprise I ended up working in a cosy, bricked office building surrounded by rolling green hills and working with a team of young energetic people, an environment which is peaceful and relaxing to work in.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the typical intern experience of being the office coffee boy, but my real job while Interning at Market Dojo was far more interesting. My job was to create short promotional material which they can use to market the company, a task which I was very happy to oblige with considering my background in Film Production.

Ed happily obliging my request to sit and let me frame the shot.

We spent a morning developing a dozen ideas all focusing on Market Dojo’s USP’s (Unique Selling Points), we needed ideas which could get across the accessibility, cost saving potential and the nature of an on demand service. Generating ideas around a company’s USP’s was an interesting challenge, something which I have learnt a great deal from. This is an aspect the Film Production course hasn’t covered yet, so it gave us new opportunities to test out our abilities.

Developing an idea is no easy task though, we spent an hour generating our ideas and then another presenting and discussing them, so that we can refine them into something that is suitable to for the company to use for their marketing. We then moved on to one of the more time-consuming tasks which were storyboarding each of the ideas we wanted to bring forward or test out. Storyboarding is a key part of the pre-production process as it allows us to plan out each shot before we begin to film, it saves us from making mistakes as we have a guideline to work from on the day.

We were working on a fairly tight schedule so we had to get everything ready to shoot quickly while still keeping the production quality high. But as film students a tight schedule with looming deadlines is all too familiar to us.

During the pre-production stage we decided to do two sets of video’s, one being a promotional video which is under a minute in length and another being a video which details what Market Dojo do. We chose to do these two videos as they can be used across multiple platforms while grabbing attention and informing the viewer, both being useful and covering different aspects.

We started by recruiting our friend Joe to be our puppet (or as he prefers it “actor”), who graciously agreed to help us out for free. After sizing him up for outfits we got straight into filming, a process which takes a lot longer than some might think. But we were wrapped within a couple of days! Once we got the footage we went straight into edit mode, we decided to do a few different versions of the film, each with minor tweaks to ensure we had all our bases covered.

Me expertly framing a shot.

The most difficult part of being a student filmmaker is dealing with limited resources and accessibility. We didn’t have access to transport, meaning certain locations are out of the question, and our kit is on loan from the university, meaning with have limited time to be able to shoot. All these aspects are difficult to work around, but we will always find a way!

I’m very pleased with how all our videos turned out and I’m excited to see what the public thinks! Overall I’ve had a great experience working at Market Dojo and feel that I’ve grown as a filmmaker with this new experience under my belt. I’m thankful for being given this first step into my professional career, so thank you Market Dojo!

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

Market Dojo’s latest release brings the ability to share data seamlessly with other solutions via what is known as an API.

The first integration has been achieved with Per Angusta on the back of two significant client wins, proving the appetite in the market for best-of-breed integrated solutions versus single-source suites.

Per Angusta

We have been partners with Per Angusta for several years and share several customers. Per Angusta makes it easy to build your procurement pipeline to manage resources effectively; track savings to enhance procurement’s impact in the company, and to store and manage your signed contracts. Ultimately, Procurement’s contribution is better understood and accepted by your organisation.

Sharing data, seamlessly

Sharing data between systems is a great way to reduce repetitive work and the potential for errors. In the case of Per Angusta, users can easily create Market Dojo sourcing events from their Per Angusta Sourcing Pipeline and quickly pass back into Per Angusta details of the savings that they have achieved in those sourcing events.

We are really excited about the value these features will bring for our joint customers.

How it works

Providing this ability in a secure manner required us to add a couple of new capabilities.

Single Sign On. This means that once you have signed into one system, logging in to another only requires a single click. It also means you can go directly to the information you need, without having to login first. When data is being transferred between systems several times a day, this becomes a significant time saver. Because we have used an industry-standard solution called JWT, it will be simple to add SSO with other systems in the future.

API. To allow Market Dojo to exchange information directly with other systems, we have created an Application Programming Interface (API). This key data to be sent back and forth quickly and securely without human intervention

What next?

Having added Single Sign On and API capabilities give us some very interesting opportunities to further extending the ways in which Market Dojo can be useful to our customers.

This will give us the ability for our customers to share data with other systems they use. We are very excited about this and some of the ideas we have discussed are:

Real-time messaging when a new bid is received

Automatically creating an e-auction event when a new purchasing request is received

Updating the company ERP system when a participant has been selected following an RFI

Checking on the current winning bid in your RFQ through tools such as Amazon Alexa.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about how Integration with Per Angusta, or have ideas about new ways our API could be applied in your business, please get in touch with nicholas.martin@marketdojo.com

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!